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Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

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Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

#151

Post by pc86 »

jacquesm wrote: post #112
neverminder wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I was rejected not too long ago by a startup with a reason that they thought I belonged in a more corporate environment (I never indicated so). In my experience if a company really needs someone they are much more receptive, otherwise they just come up with a BS like that and worse.

> they thought I belonged in a more corporate environment That's their way of saying they either can't afford you or you are too smart to be worked to death for 0.0001% stock.

That's a pretty generous grant, not everyone can be Employee #2.

Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

#152

Post by vonmoltke »

relkor wrote: post #129
devsquid wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude you'll always have to do something with HTML/CSS/JS. Even if its not your main gig. Luckily all three are fairly simple. Just go make a simple webapp without any libraries and from that you'll pick up 99% of what you'd need to know.

Don't know why this is being downvoted, it certainly resonates with my experience. I write C by day, but I found that making a webapp that compared offers w/ cost of living and tax treatment to be an eye opener. I learned a great deal about how the internet works from just that weekend project, and I would heartily recommend making a webapp. Like it or not, HTML/CSS/JS is about as cross platform as C (don't do anythi…

It's "Dude you'll always have to do something with HTML/CSS/JS." that is attracting the downvotes. That is a thoroughly web-centric view of of the world. Some people never write software with graphical interfaces at all, let alone a web-based one. I never touched a GUI (LabView doesn't count :P) until about nine months ago, and I have been writing code full-time for over seven years and intermittently for over thirteen.

The comment about how easy it is to learn is spot on, in my experience. I was very surprised at how fast I ramped up on vanilla JavaScript and Angular.

Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

#153

Post by Grue3 »

sarciszewski wrote: post #139

Eventually these folks got accepted though. I guess that's the moral we're supposed to take away from this: If you get rejected a lot, but you keep trying, you'll eventually be accepted? If so, that's bullshit. The only reason we don't see any examples here of people who never get accepted is because they're invisible to the industry. Many of them probably ended up committing suicide or switching careers. (I've conte…

Exactly. These people are all from the first-world countries, they have plenty of opportunities to get hired so eventually they do. I was rejected by dozens of "cool" companies, almost never even getting to the technical interview, because they'd rather not hire a foreigner. I had to find a local job which pays me a wage most people here would consider laughable.

Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

#154

Post by schwarzmx »

s3nnyy wrote: post #124
js-coder wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a result the failing-rate for the mentioned killer-subjects is dropped from 80% to 20-30%. Do you have any links to back that up? I'm not studying at TUM but I'd be really surprised if there's a 80% pass rate for those subjects.

Around 2008 Prof. Mayr stopped teaching discrete mathematics. After that in most of the midterms there was a solvable problem. Often it was something like "Use the Dijkstra's algorithm to find the shortest paths in this graph. 10 Points" (and the exam had like 32 points).

I don't see how one professor makes the entire program.

FWIW I did my masters there and in my opinion the way they evaluate students is suboptimal anyway - but I don't know if that's a TUM thing or a German thing.

Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

#155

Post by anantzoid »

msoad wrote: post #72

I was rejected by Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Skype and many more companies. I got rejected by Apple 3 times and two times with Facebook and Google. I'm now working for Google. One thing I can tell for sure, specially after interviewing others. It's all random. Most of interviewers make their mind about the candidate in seconds. If you are a charming person you have a good cha…

I passed 3 interviews with 6 interviewers for Booking (they even flew me to Amsterdam for that). 1 of them didn't seem to like me, even before I answered his questions. The rest were very impressed (as stated in the feedback). Got rejected.

Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

#156

Post by [deleted] »

golergka wrote: post #73
lkrubner wrote: post #21

I love this, but it could go even further: Blaine Cook was "rejected" from Twitter after years of hard work. But he faced an insane scaling problem, and most of us would look bad if we faced the same set of problems. Steve Jobs was "rejected" by Apple after years of hard work. Or my all time favorite: John Lasseter was fired from Disney because he was too enthusiastic about cutting edge digital animation (rather than…

TBH, I don't think that Lasseter would be able to do what he did if he stayed at Disney. So one could argue that Disney's decisions were good for them in the long run.

[deleted]

Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

#157

Post by pc86 »

jacquesm wrote: post #109
_yosefk wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could the difference be due to education being cheaper and thus there being fewer reasons to forego it?

No, it just saves a bunch of time and you later won't hear (when someone messes up) 'he doesn't even have a degree, what did you expect'? It's the recruiting equivalent of buying IBM (or Microsoft I guess). If the applicant pool is large enough any quick way to discriminate that skews positively for applicant capability is going to be used. It is also much easier to see if someone has a degree than to actually test i…

> If the applicant pool is large enough any quick way to discriminate that skews positively for applicant capability is going to be used.

I think a lot of self-taught developers (myself too earlier in my career) fail to realize this.

If you've got 1,000 applicants and your job is to schedule 10 interviews from that pool, you will do anything that won't absolutely destroy candidate quality. It's not about the finding the best, it's about finding someone who wants the job and will be able to do it. The name of the game is not minimizing false negatives (disregarding good people), but minimizing false positives (interviewing shitbirds).

So if you work for BigCo you say the person need three years of corporate experience. You're down to 800 applicants. One year of experience in the JavaScripts. 750 applicants. Maybe the phrase "SQL Server" has to be on their resume. 400 applicants. College degree. 320 applicants. Computer Science degree. 120 applicants. Maybe you want to filter by your preferred recruiter, because they only charge you 11% of base salary instead of 18% like that other firm. 22 applicants. Now you can actually read the resumes and pick the top half to interview. Anyone who actually wrote a cover letter and is in this pile is pretty much guaranteed an interview.

Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

#158

Post by schwarzmx »

pc86 wrote: post #150
s3nnyy wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around 2008 Prof. Mayr stopped teaching discrete mathematics. After that in most of the midterms there was a solvable problem. Often it was something like "Use the Dijkstra's algorithm to find the shortest paths in this graph. 10 Points" (and the exam had like 32 points).

> the professors started to introduce one problem in each exam that anyone could pass who practised a bit and / or wasn't entirely stupid. What is considered a passing grade at one of these schools? At my private liberal arts college in the US it was usually (but ultimately up to professor discretion): 00-59% - Fail (0.0 for GPA) 60-67% - D (1.0) 68-69% - D+ (1.3) 70-72% - C- (1.7) 73-77% - C (2.0) 78-79% - C+ (2.3)…

Works similarly in Germany, with the difference that 4.0 is the lowest passing grade and 1.0 is the highest.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_Germany

Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

#159

Post by pc86 »

yawgmoth wrote: post #134
thewarrior wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working for 2+ decades while making something like $150k+ a year on average over the long term , and retiring with substantial savings , without having worked 100 hour weeks on the startup lottery , sounds pretty awesome to me. Don't know maybe I'm not elite founder material.

Other companies pay great salaries. In Detroit, for example, you can make 100-130k with a much lower cost of living (even if you're living downtown or in one of the wealthy suburbs). I presume Chicago, Boston, ATL, etc., would be just as lucrative if not moreso. If the bar is based on salary and hours, you can make it in a lot of places.

Arguably if your goal as a software developer is to make as much money as possible and retire as soon as possible, you should probably work on HFT in the lowest-COL area that supports that field (maybe Chicago with a long train commute or something?)

I'm a team lead and make less than an entry level developer at any SF or NYC shop, but I'm willing to bet that I can save more and have more put away for retirement than most as well.

Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

#160

Post by AlwaysRock »

ido wrote: post #69
devsquid wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude I couldn't imagine telling a hopeful young person that they didn't get the job. Do you tell them why, so hopefully they can take that info and grow from it, or do you make something up so they don't feel like shit?

You are often not allowed/better off not saying anything due to legal risks of letting slip something that could get your sued.

Really? Is that a real thing? (I'm a tech recruiter in Chicago) If I recruit someone good I don't expect them to nail the first interview. Sometimes they do and that's great but more often then not it takes some fine tuning. I'm not going to give up on them after one interview.

Half of my job is helping developers with their soft skills. I see tons of guys who can do anything that's asked of them but they just cant interview well. Some people are really bad at telling interviewers what they want to hear, some people are bad at sounding excited about what they have been working on, and some people are really bad at talking to people they dont know.

After first round interviews I sit down with managers and ask specifically why they were a yes or a no. If he tells me it was a technical problem then I get as many specifics so the developer can fill in the gaps for the next interview. If it's a personality thing then I'll work with that developer so they can nail the next interview.

I've had maybe 2 managers ever be sheepish about telling me why a developer was a yes or a no.

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